Baby turtles will be released tonight at 6.30 pm on Playa Marlin- behind Kulkulkan. There is an event starting at 4pm until 9pm with various activities, t shirts dinner etc which costs but the turtle release at 6.30pm is free. Have fun Tracey x
Thanks Tracey! Very cool! We were already going to be at that beach this afternoon, so this is exciting! Take Care, Kris
We went to this, bumped into Kris on the beach (sorry we didnt recognise you, been a while!) No sign of any events on the beach itself around 4:30 so we went over to the mall to kill time. Turns out the events were inside the mall, just kids stuff really - games, puppet show etc organised by local scouts and guides with a nice ecological theme. Then back over to the beach to release the turtles. Quite a lot of people but well organised. Dani enjoyed releasing her turtle, me too. Couldnt believe how dead Plaza Kukulcan was, hardly a soul in the place except for the kids and many places closed... on a Saturday afternoon. Thanks for letting us know Tracey, another tick on the list.
We arrived at the beach early, talked to the "official" looking man who said they were waiting for the turtles. When the turtles arrived at 6:30 (two hours later), there were a good number of us waiting there. They THEN told us that it was a private release for the Boy Scouts and IF there were enough turtles we could release one. Those of us that had been waiting on the beach for hours formed a big old line while a hundred Boy Scouts trooped down out of nowhere (I guess the Plaza from Steve's report). So, we have one VERY disappointed little three year old who waited three hours and did NOT get to even touch a turtle. We felt that this was extremely disorganized and were quite miffed that they couldn't tell us that this was a "private" event before we got in a huge line in the dark. Steve, glad you guys got to jump in with the scouts, odd that we didn't see you! We didn't recognize Kris either, oops, guess it had been quite some time. I'm happy Dani got involved but yeah, we're pretty miffed about the whole thing. Tracey's husband and son came down and they too had to leave without any turtle love.
Ok, so I have to add something too! As soon as we saw the huge amount of Boy Scouts show up, we decided to get out of the line...knew we had little to no chance of touching a turtle at that point. So, we walked to the water's edge to just watch... A woman tried to take a picture (I think she must not have heard the 100 warnings they gave against flash photography), at which point one of the "turtle guys" took her camera away and started yelling at her. He then was pushing her and fighting with her...telling her she was hurting the turtles, etc. The woman's husband jumped in, and she got her camera back. Then they were yelling at us to get away from the water's edge. We finally decided to leave and get away from the ridiculousness of the situation...as we were leaving, someone was yelling "Turn off your cell phones! You're scaring the turtles!". Seriously? All of the people yelling, etc. wasn't scaring them, but be sure to turn off those cell phones! You just have to laugh, I guess...
Sorry to hear it didn't work out for you guys. My understanding was that it wasn't totally private and exclusive but those that had registered (registration was 65 pesos inside the plaza included T shirt and the puppet shows / games etc) were to go first and then it would be those that hadn't registered afterwards. The scouts did make up a huge number but there were also quite a few people like us who weren't anything to do with the scouts who also registered. I think the fault probably lay with the lack of any real instruction / direction on the beach itself, we only found the registration process by chance when we went off to the mall to kill time. You'd have thought they could have put up a sign or something on the beach. It was a little chaotic but considering the hundreds of people on a steep beach in the dark I'm not sure it could have been done that much better. We were in the third group to release the turtles and left pretty soon after as Dani was tired, so not sure how it finished up. But we had been told that there were enough turtles for each child to release two or three each if they went back in the queue again.
